Xana Kernodle’s father, Jeff Kernodle, emotionally reflected on not going to his daughter’s house in Moscow, Idaho, on the night that she and fellow college students Ethan Chapin, Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves were murdered.
While appearing in Netflix’s July docuseries The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare, Jeff explained that he considered stopping by Xana’s home after he attended a Washington State University football game in Pullman on the night she was killed.
“I should give Xana a call and maybe I’ll just go over and stay at her house tonight,” he said in the three-part docuseries, which premiered on Wednesday, July 29. “And I kind of thought about it and I drank quite a bit that night. Xana probably would get mad if I drove over there, so I didn’t go but I could have gone, and things would have been different. Maybe they would have had a chance, you know? Some of them.”
Jeff added that the killings were the “wrong thing to have to deal with” and that the experience was “everybody’s worst nightmare.”
Xana, 20, her boyfriend Chapin, 20, and their friends Mogen, 21, and Kaylee Goncalves, 21, were fatally stabbed in the off campus home on November 13, 2022.
Just more than one month later, Bryan Kohberger was taken into custody for the killings after DNA evidence connected him to the crime scene.
Jeff also said he was surprised to learn that Kohberger, 31, was attending Washington State University alongside his older daughter, Jazzmin Kernodle.
“When I found out that he lives a little ways away from Jazzmin on [the] WSU campus, I was flipped out and wished that Jazzmin wouldn’t have been still staying there at that school … but at least they got him,” he said. “That’s what I was happy about — the only thing.”
More than two years after his arrest, Kohberger pleaded guilty to murder in July 2025. As part of his plea deal, prosecutors spared him the death penalty and he was sentenced to four lifetimes in prison without the possibility of parole.
“I was surprised they gave him a plea,” Jeff said. “He shouldn’t have got one … He should have to tell them why he did it. Tell all of us parents why he did it if he was going to get the plea.”
One year later, Kohberger filed a petition to withdraw his guilty plea.
“My actual innocence is my truth, and the plea, hinged on by false promises and blatant disinformation, MUST be withdrawn,” Kohberger said in a statement to The New York Times on Sunday, July 26.
On Monday, July 27, Goncalves’s family issued a statement about the filing and slammed Kohberger in the process.
“‘The mosquito you just can’t seem to swat’ — that is what Kohberger and his following have become to this family,” the Goncalves family wrote.
They went on to say that Kohberger was “a guilty man once again claiming he is innocent,” and that he previously “chose not to leave his fate — or the facts of the case — to a jury” by accepting the plea deal.
“He never cried foul, never claimed he was uninformed or pressured, and never suggested there were problems with the discovery materials he and his counsel had reviewed for two years that should have been challenged,” the statement added. “He admitted his guilt. When asked whether he was actually guilty, he answered, ‘Yes.’”
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